You know those nightmares where you are shouting a warning but no
sound comes out? Well, that’s the intensity with which the
experts wanted to tell younger people
that spending years in a job you dislike is a
recipe for regret and a tragic mistake. There was
no issue about which the experts were more adamant and
forceful. Over and over they prefaced their comments
with, “If there’s one thing I want your readers to know it’s . .
.” From the vantage point of looking back over long experience,
wasting around two thousand hours of irretrievable lifetime each
year is pure idiocy.

What else did they have to say about career?

Here’s the refrigerator list:

1. Choose a career for the intrinsic rewards, not the
financial ones. The biggest career mistake people make
is selecting a profession based only on potential earnings. A
sense of purpose and passion for one’s work beats a bigger
paycheck any day.

2. Don’t give up on looking for a job that makes you
happy. According to the experts, persistence is the key
to finding a job you love. Don’t give up easily.

3. Make the most of a bad job. If you find
yourself in a less-than-ideal work situation, don’t waste the
experience; many experts learned invaluable lessons from bad
jobs.

4. Emotional intelligence trumps every other
kind. Develop your interpersonal skills if you want to
succeed in the workplace. Even people in the most technical
professions have their careers torpedoed if they lack emotional
intelligence.

5. Everyone needs autonomy. Career satisfaction
is often dependent on how much autonomy you have on the job. Look
for the freedom to make decisions and move in directions that
interest you, without too much control from the top.

Another point worth making is advice the older folks consistently
did not give:

No one— not a single person out of a thousand— said that
to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make
money to buy the things you want.

No one— not a single person— said it’s important to be at
least as wealthy as the people around you, and if you have more
than they do it’s real success.

No one— not a single person— said you should choose your
work based on your desired future earning power.

Now it may sound absurdly obvious when worded in this
way. But this is in fact how many people operate on a day-to-day
basis. The experts did not say these things; indeed
almost no one said anything remotely like them. Instead they
consistently urged finding a way to earn enough to live on
without condemning yourself to a job you dislike.

This might be a lot to remember and ask yourself on a daily
basis. What’s a quick litmus test to determine if you’re on the
path to happiness or regret?

You should ask yourself this: do I wake up in the
morning looking forward to work?